A Jamaican in New York reading and wondering wha really a gwan

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Di decoder ring

I-and-I want to write a post and at the same time I-and-I don’t want to write the post.

As I was composing the last post here, I decided that the very next post would be to analyze some of the steps that could and should be taken to stem the tide of bloodshed currently over-flowing the levee of “economically-depressed” ghettos; and threatening to flood Jamaica much like the rains are flooding the American state of Iowa.

Since so many other commentators are calling for the Jamaican state to abridge and abuse the rights of the poor and poorly connected, this post was supposed to be a look at the ways in which crime and lawlessness would ease up if we abridged the rights of the well-to-do and well-connected.

Then the bomb went off!

We were told there were bomb threats in the Jamaica Gleaner’s Thursday Talk gossip column a little while ago.

Problems in Ochi

3.Businesses and hoteliers in and around Ocho Rios are running scared after last week’s brazen developments. Seems they are convinced the hoax of a bomb threat was directly related to the armed robbery elsewhere. And, they are none too happy with the growing squatter communities mushrooming everywhere as they say it produces a two-fold problem: denuding the area causing flooding and creating a haven for criminal activity.

Since I didn’t read about the prevalence of bomb threats elsewhere, it sadly strengthened my belief that the only hard-news in Jamaica on a regular basis is to be found in this gossip column and no-where else.

But it took a while to have the significance sink in! We have bombs going off in Jamaica now. This is a new low. It reminds me of the other notable milestones on the slow creep to chaos when I expected Jamaicans to rise up and demand that their political leaders level with them and re-establish law and order.

One such milestone was when the decapitations took place in rural Jamaica, and my dominant thought was “Al Qaida dey a yard.” We’ve see decapitations before in husband-wife homicides but never before in a rural area by assailants presumed to be unknown to the victims. Now we have bombs going off and the people still seem complacent. It is as if our resilience retards us; as we descend into hell we lower our standards more and more. Where does it end? At what point do we stop adapting?

So I took a hiatus from Jamaican news. I read the news in Jamaica everyday to follow the runnings in the island I’m from. Sometimes it seems that island is invisible, and is replaced by a third-rate, third-world, rinky-dink banana republic where atrocities that should be inconceivable are commonplace.

I have enough bomb-news from Baghdad everyday, do I now need to read about daily blasts in Jamaica. It wasn’t that big a bomb, but this doesn’t auger well at all.

So I would like to write a post, but one of the core missions of this blog is to strip away the cute euphemisms bigga heads use to dehumanize poor people in Jamaica or patronize the masses that comprise the shrinking middle-class. We say we need more “hard policing” as code for “shoot more poor people;” and we talk about “economically-depressed areas” with no acknowledgment of who is depressing them.

It’s easy enough to decode other people’s euphemisms, but harder to speak without using them myself. But perhaps the hardest part is to write about some of the cold, calculated steps that will need to be taken to get us out of this mess. So I have a post, it nuh pretty. It’s Machiavellian in many ways, and I was in the process of cleaning it up. Now I will dutty it back up and post it.

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5 thoughts on “Di decoder ring”

I remember some years ago stepping over the threshold of the morgue in Kingston for the first time and having to be promptly removed and revived with smelling salts. When I came to, I wondered in disbelief how the folks who worked there seemed so complacent and were not any longer troubled by the odors that assaulted me.

I guess that’s what protracted brutality and violence does to the sensibilities. Dulls them and leaves the host traumatized, quite numb, probably apathetic. Jamaicans will keep adjusting to the new levels of violence as they feel they must, to protect their own sanity, as they have over the years.

Or have they? It must be madness to still revere (in some cases reward) the architects of the nation’s disorder and demise…

Is there a tipping point on the part of the citizenry to the murderous, nihilistic, and blood thirsty carnage that/which has metamorphosed Jamaica into the killing field, or the Cambodia of the Caribbean? Each day seems to unearth more vile,vicious, barbaric, and horrendous acts of murder,mayhem and violence across the island state than the previous day.This intractable, persistent and unabated incidence of violence, most likely, has tremendously shaken the psychological core and mental substructure of the society, in many ways, similar or reminiscent to countries that/which are engaged in protracted conflict,and civil wars,such as Iraq,Afghanistan,Lebanon,and Northern Ireland to mention a few.Indeed,constant exposure to such levels of carnage on a daily basis can and will create a certain level of numbness and stupefaction to the senses.In a word, the anesthetization of Jamaican society and its people to hard core and blood curling violence, which in actuality lends or allows for a certain level of accumstomedness,familiarization and habituation. Consequently,such psychological accomodation whether directly or indirectly has led to a muted,muffled,subdued and indistinct form of national outrage, in contradistinction to a real and vehement,zealous,urgent and impassioned demand, acting as a catalyst with respect to the tipping point, and manifesting itself in a high, emboldened and intense level of national outrage on the part of the Jamaican people with the sole objective of rescuing their society from the unfathomable chasm.

Yes star, one is anticipating your post on how crime and lawlessnes can, or, could be decreased if the rights of the well to do and connected are abridged or curtailed.Indeed,the culture of criminality that/which has manifested and institutionalised itself in Jamaican society over the last three decades transcends the lumpen,the poor,the materially dispossessed, and the declasse elements of the society. Quite frankly, the embourgeoisiement of criminality, and illegal behaviour in Jamaica, is extremely egregious, but unlike the marginalized, it is conspicuously obvious that Jamaican jurisprudence is not applicable when elements from the well to do and connected are in breach, or contravention of the laws of the land. Again,looking forward to this post.RESPECT!!

Well the bomb threat is nothing new in Jamaica. I used to get them in the call centre of a company I worked in from time to time. We would evacuate the bomb squad would arrive sooner or later (usually later) and comb the building and we go back to work…unless we were lucky enough for the threat to be in the 4 hours prior to end of work day.
Suffice it to say I have never heard of any bombing in Jamaica…at all. Well not the same kinds of bombs that are at play elsewhere. Our ‘bombs’ are molotov cocktail ones….gas filled bottles with a cloth wick lit and thrown against a building…usually to start a fire or burn out something!
This may be why the standard news media were not carrying any coverage of these ‘bombings elsewhere’ since they aren’t really major comparatively to shootings and murders, car crashes and theft, corruption and political quarrels, and the list goes on. As for decapitation, chopping up somebody is not a new phenomenon especially in rural Jamaica. Admittedly it’s usually the aggrieved who ends up chopping up the ‘aggriever’. Communities consider it swift and effective justice – which betrays the failure of the national justice system…but that’s for another post.